Internal Branding Best Practices to Craft Your Culture
The strongest brands aren’t just understood by the outside world—they’re believed in by the people behind them. Internal branding is what happens when your identity holds steady across departments, disciplines, and time zones.
When culture is treated as a strategic asset, it does more than boost morale. It becomes the reason people show up and the lens through which they make decisions. That alignment is one of the many reasons why internal branding needs to be designed with as much care as your customer-facing work.
What Is Internal Branding?
Internal branding is the act of translating your company’s purpose, values, and voice into the lived experience of your employees. It’s how people inside the business make sense of what you stand for—and how they carry that into their roles, rituals, and relationships.
This shows up everywhere: onboarding, internal comms, leadership behaviours, even how product teams write release notes. When the org map gets messy, internal branding is what holds everything together.
Why Internal Branding Matters
Employee belief isn't a soft metric. It shows up in productivity, consistency, and whether teams act like stewards of the brand or just staff on payroll.
A recent Gallup study found that companies with highly engaged workforces see a 23% boost in profitability compared to those with low engagement. That kind of lift comes from alignment, not perks.
When internal branding is strong, people move with confidence. They understand the brand well enough to improvise without losing the plot.
Internal Branding Strategies That Work
At Cogs & Marvel, we’ve built culture-driven experiences for some of the world’s most recognisable brands. As a result, we’ve what internal branding strategies actually stick, scale, and spread across teams.
Here are five that deliver real impact:
Use Brand Values as Operating System
Values only matter if they shape decisions. When they’re built into how priorities are set, how conflict is handled, and how people are recognised, they stop being theoretical.
Use real examples, not abstract slogans. The more employees can connect values to their actual work, the more likely they are to use them as a lens—not a list.
Keep Internal Comms Human
Internal messaging should sound like your brand. If your external tone is bold and expressive, but internal updates read like legalese, trust erodes fast.
Make internal comms part of the brand experience. The right tone doesn’t just get attention—it builds understanding.
Leverage Events That Reinforce Culture in 3D
An internal event is a chance to create shared memory. When designed with intention, an experiential event becomes a moment that re-centres purpose and galvanises teams.
Leadership summits, onboarding immersions, brand anniversaries shouldn’t be treated as side projects. Rather, they’re some of the most high-impact opportunities to make the brand feel tangible.
Elevate the People Who Embody the Brand
Most brands have unofficial culture carriers. They lead without needing a mandate. They influence behaviour by example.
Spot them. Celebrate them. Invite them into decisions around brand training, messaging, or team rituals. Their buy-in will ripple further than any comms cascade.
Keep the Internal and External Brand in Sync
Customers and employees shouldn’t feel like they’re seeing two different companies. When internal language, storytelling, visuals, and experiences match the external brand, everyone gains clarity.
That doesn’t mean mirroring every message. It means anchoring both sides of the brand in the same truth.
Internal Branding Case Studies & Examples
Adobe Virtual Field Trip
Adobe: A Virtual Experience to Reconnect Creative Culture
In partnership with Cogs & Marvel, Adobe hosted a virtual “field trip” for over 250 global employees and creative partners. The goal: to give its creative community a space to reconnect, recharge, and reflect on the power of creativity within the Adobe brand.
The experience was a fully custom-built digital environment—a stylised island featuring 360° interaction zones, live talks, an art gallery, a forest for mental reset, and even an underwater meditation space. Sessions were shaped around play, reflection, and experimentation. Instead of polished keynotes, attendees encountered sensory prompts, ambient music, and creative invitations designed to spark curiosity.
As an internal branding activation, the Adobe Field Trip brought Adobe’s purpose to life in a way that felt personal, not performative. It deepened emotional connection across teams and earned external recognition too—including MUSE Creative Gold, ICAD Gold, and APMC Gold.
Pinterest Dining Experience
Pinterest: Experiential Dining for Executive Alignment
Proving once again that great internal branding pairs well with event design was the Pinterest dining experience. Also supported by our team, this event consisted of a high-concept dinner designed exclusively for the brand’s C-suite executives. Created as a tactile expression of brand identity, each detail was carefully considered for format encouraged the kind of unscripted connection that doesn’t happen in meeting rooms.
Enabled by sensory marketing tactics that reflects the brand, experiences like this helped create memory and momentum for the culture. For Pinterest, this powerfully gave their leaders a collective anchor they can draw on as they shape the future of the brand.
HubSpot: Turning Culture into a Living System
HubSpot developed its Culture Code to define how the company operates, makes decisions, and communicates as it scales. What began as an internal slide deck has evolved into a dynamic framework that’s been viewed more than five million times.
The Code outlines key values like HEART (Humble, Empathetic, Adaptable, Remarkable, Transparent), and these values show up in how the company hires, leads, and supports its people. HubSpot reinforces this through recurring programs like HEART Week, where each value becomes a daily theme anchored by stories, actions, and employee recognition.
As an internal branding strategy, it works because it’s embedded. The Culture Code isn’t just a reference for employees—it’s a system that helped shape how people experience their brand day to day.
How to Spot the Impact
Strong internal branding shows up in behaviour. You’ll hear teams referencing brand values without being prompted. You’ll see more aligned decision-making, better onboarding experiences, and less friction across functions.
Useful signals:
Pulse survey data
Peer-to-peer recognition trends
Retention and referral stats
Uptake of internal programs tied to culture
Feedback that references brand language, not just benefits
The brand doesn’t need to be perfect. But it should feel coherent. And it should travel well across every layer of the company.
Bring Your Internal Brand to Life with Cogs & Marvel
We partner with brands to build internal alignment that doesn’t feel forced. From immersive executive sessions to brand-rich onboarding or internal campaigns, we design for belief, not box-ticking.
If your culture needs anchoring—or your strategy needs storytelling—we’d love to help.
